It is done.
Cinnamon is out of his life. She’s been given back. He has released her to the world, and it is beautiful.
The silence was complete that night. There wasn’t a frozen cricket chirping. He’d worked quickly and then he’d left the office park, stopping between pools of streetlights to pull strips of black tape off his license plate. Then he drove away into the darkness. There was nothing left in the space she had filled but relief. Everything inside him was like a well that had been pumped off, leaving a void, a soothing, relaxing void.
Drive straight home, he tells himself.
But he can already feel new pressure seeping in. It will rise and get more turbulent with each passing day and it will soon be roiling again.
Drive straight home, he tells himself again.
But he doesn’t. Other won’t allow it. Instead he drives to the wrong part of town, where the girls work late. He sees them out there on the corners as he passes by.
Are we already considering the next one?
He wonders at himself, and the thing that is inside him that seems to be pushing up and taking over. He thinks about that stupid hooker, and how that punch wasn’t nearly enough. He drives around for over half an hour looking for her. But he doesn’t see her. He only sees black girls out tonight and that isn’t going to work. So he finally drives home.